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1. Is it always better the more SFS you take? I take 4 g before breakfast every day. Before my IBS got bad that was enough to stabilize me, but then it didn't work anymore which was what made me start with loperamide (and go through the tests to get a proper diagnosis). I tried once to increase the dose to 8 g a day (divided in 2 doses) but then it seemed it didn't get better - it was just more of the bad stuff that needed to come out, if you know what I mean...
How much SFS is the right amount varies a lot from person to person. I'm IBS-D and I take 14 grams of SF from my SFS. I plan to go up a little more than that. I would say that if more doesn't help, then there's no point in taking it. Remember, however, that it's better to increase the dose slowly rather than quickly. So if you just doubled the dose from one day to the next, your tummy may be reacting to that.

2. It says in Heather's book that you need to drink - a lot - in order to make the SFS work. Now because I have had a paralysis disease when I was a kid my bladder is a bit sensitive and so if I drank that much I'd pretty much spend the whole day in the bathroom anyway, just empyting my bladder instead. It says on the bottle of my SFS that you should drink one glass of fluid with each dose. But when I talked to the pharmacist about it she said that I should not drink so much because when drinking less the SFS would just absorb the excess water in my bowel system. Kind of a contradiction...
Actually, this is exactly what you want the SFS to do. In fact, this is part of what all SF does. According to Heather:

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How is this possible? The "soluble" in soluble fiber means that it dissolves in water (though it is not digested). This allows it to absorb excess liquid in the colon, preventing diarrhea by forming a thick gel and adding a great deal of bulk as it passes intact through the gut. This gel (as opposed to a watery liquid) also keeps the GI muscles stretched gently around a full colon, giving those muscles something to easily "grip" during peristaltic contractions, thus preventing the rapid transit time and explosive bowel movements of diarrhea as well.

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So you want the soluble fiber to suck up water and turn into gel.

3. I haven't been able to find a SFS in Sweden that doesn't contain an artificial sweetener. There are no ones with sugar either. The one I use now is based on sterkulia and contains the sweetener "sackarin" (in Swedish ).
I think this is what is "saccharin" in English (it's "sakkarin" in Norwegian/Norsk).
I have been thinking of buying Heather's SFS online but that is really expensive when you don't live in the US plus if you're unlucky you might have to pay duty on it too. I've even approached the leading health store chain in Sweden and suggested that they would import Heather's products but I haven't received the answer from the product manager yet. Any suggestions?
Unfortunately, no. An SFS has made a world of difference for me, but if I could only take ones that had articial sweeteners, I think I would stop taking one. For me, artificial sweeteners do more harm than the SFS does good. I know there are some people who do not use SFS and do okay.

3. In the books it is stressed that everything should be low fat, though I find it the best to neither eat too much nor too little fat I think. I'm just wondering: by your standards - what is considered low fat? Examples of products in Sweden:

*Soy milk (no oil): 2 % fat
*Oat chocolate drink (with oil): 1.5 % fat
*Soy ice cream: 10 % fat
*Oat ice cream: 9 % fat
*Soy cream cheese: around 40 % fat!!!
*Soy yoghurt: 2 % fat
This I can't help with. The rule is to get no more than 25% of calories from fat, so I look at the total calories in the product, how many of those calories come from fat, and do the math. You should remember, though, that it's the total fat per meal and then per day. So, for example, the soy milk I buy gets 35% of its calories from fat which is high. But once I use it in cooking something without much more fat or my husband puts it on his very low fat cereal, the total percent of calories from fat for the whole dish is lower.

Oh, and it says in the book that cocoa powder is basically fat free. Do you mean that you typically use so little in say a cake that the fat contribution to the whole cake is minimal per serving? Because at least in Sweden the cocoa powder in itself has a 20 % fat content.
Kind of, I think. The cocoa powder I use gets 25% of its calories from fat. However, it is very low calorie so there are also very few fat calories in it. This means that by the time I use it with lots of flour to make brownies, for example, the fat from the cocoa is not much compared with the whole dish.

I haven't been able to find any soy products marketed as "low fat" at all in Sweden!!!

4. Now a question about functional D vs IBS-D: I think in Sweden they don't really make a difference between the two. Like so many others I got an IBS diagnosis based only on symptoms long before it got bad and I had the necessary tests done. And I think that the GI specialist who did my colonoscopy just wrote functional bowel disease in the letter he sent to me with the results. As far as I can remember from when I read about functional D somewhere on this site, it was stressed that pain was a big difference
between IBS-D and functional D, being present in IBS-D but not in functional D. But I thought pain was not necessary for the IBS diagnosis according to Rome II? Isn't it enough to have 2/3 of pain, change in frequency, change in stool appearance? I used to have stomach cramps associated with D back when I had the occasional attacks, but since I started getting D pretty much every day I find I'm more nauseous than being in pain. It's more a question of un uncomfortable feeling in the stomach.
This I don't know.

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